Sanctuary
by Ketharil
Summary: [Complete] Sanctuaries tell you a lot about a person... Jaina reflects back on her sanctuaries. Another Jaina and Kyp. AU, post-NJO.
1. Chapter 1

Part 1 of 3, **Sanctuary**

By **Ketharil**, who is really **SaberBlade **on tf.n, so don't worry, this isn't plagiarized.  

**Disclaimer:**  Star Wars isn't mine, just this little piece of it that I'm creating.  Making no money, intending no harm, hoping to explore a bit of the world I love.

**Description: **Sanctuaries are personal.  Understanding sanctuaries helps in understanding the person.  Jaina looks back on the sanctuaries she's had.

.

.

.

You find sanctuary in the strangest places.  But strange or not, the places where you find sanctuary become the places where you can truly be yourself, and after a while, you no longer see the strangeness- only the sanctuary.

            I've had lots of sanctuaries.  

            One of my first sanctuaries was my dad's ship, and those of you that don't consider that a strange sanctuary never met my dad... or his ship.  When I was little, that ship was a whole world for me.  I could race my brothers in the small corridors, running up and down and tagging each wall before spinning around to beat them to the next dead end.  The three of us would cram ourselves around the dejarik table, and beg Mom and Dad until they came and squeezed themselves in on the edges, like bookends on a shelf full of kids.  I used to have to sit on my dad's lap to be able to lean across the table and direct my dejarik pieces, and Jacen would sit in Mom's lap, and the two of us would play dejarik and ignore any advice from our parents.  He won, of course, always– he was more patient than me, and he would set traps up and down the board.  I'd see the traps and not care, and eventually I'd lose too many points, if not pieces, and I'd lose.  But Dad always would laugh each time I'd send my holo pieces bravely marching through Jacen's plots, and so would I.  

            I could survive anything then.

            But eventually, I outgrew that sanctuary.  Oh, it's still a sanctuary of sorts for me still, but it's not the same.  The same hallways I raced in seem smaller now– six steps running and I'm from one end to the other, and I've had to dash down the corridors in the panic of an emergency too many times for me to consider running in them a game.  The dejarik table seems battered and old, and the holo pieces flicker and fuzz with static on the rare occasion that they deign to work.  I can no longer crouch underneath the display in the gun turrets to hide from angry or annoyed friends and family; I don't fit in the special smuggling container Dad built for me to hide in when I was six.  The _Falcon_ is no longer a whole world to me.  She is an aging, battered freighter that's seen better days, a ship that is so heavily modified it's a wonder any of her systems still run.  Dad used to joke that she belonged in a museum... but the truth is that nowadays she'd fit in better in a scrap heap.

            It's an odd kind of pain, to look back on an old sanctuary.  The _Falcon_ hurts too, on another level.  She was Dad's first love.  It hurt to see her after Chewie died, but it hurts worse now that Dad's gone too.  It's a strange type of loss, attached to the loss of Dad, but separate.  I've mourned Dad, and I'll miss him for the rest of my life.  The _Falcon_ is a barely-living reminder of him.  At first, I could barely look at her without seeming to see my Dad tinkering with some jury-rigged system.  I'd stand still, hoping that this time he'd turn toward me and give me that grin of his and wave me over to explain some obscure engine part to me, but the memories would fade and I'd be left standing alone in some empty hanger bay, staring at the _Falcon_ with tears running down my cheeks.

            And it hurts, because I'll step into the cockpit and see a loose wire and think, "Dad would have had that fixed days ago."  Or I'll see the burn marks on the outside of her, and think, "Dad would never have let her get this scraped up."

            I'm almost afraid that as the _Falcon_ deteriorates, so do my memories of Dad.  I know that's not the case, but still, it hurts to see something he loved begin to show age and wear and tear.  And I do try to keep her together.  She is my home, after all.  But the engine and the shields have first priority, and then come the guns and life support.  I haven't had time to work on the purely cosmetic, on the basic comfort of the ship.  Not for years.  And it hurts to look and somehow feel that I'm not taking good enough care of something my dad loved.

            I said as much to Jacen, a year or so after Dad died, and all he did was look at me with that serious sad expression on his face and say quietly, "Dad loved you more, Jaina.  He understands."

            Jacen died only four days later, so I guess Jacen explained it to Dad in whatever world waits for us after death.

            Jacen understood.  Jacen always understood.  He was the one who found my third sanctuary, the one on Yavin 4.  But I'm getting ahead of myself; I should explain my second sanctuary next.

            It was when I was in one of my pre-adolescent "I-really-am-an-adult" stages.  I was mad at Anakin for something or another– I think it was jealously that he had completed some puzzle before me– and so to prove how much more grown-up and mature I was, I left in a huff.  I was all of ten years old and I was lost in Coruscant.  Well, I suppose I should clarify.  I was lost in _pre-Vong Coruscant_.  The _planet-wide city_ Coruscant.

            Not a good place for a ten year old girl to get lost.

            But instead of getting kidnapped, sold into slavery, recognized and escorted home, or killed (all things which people have attempted to do to me on Coruscant, incidently), I ran into Zekk.  And since to a ten year old girl a twelve year old boy is infinitely wiser and more experienced, I explained everything.  It wasn't the first time I had met him, but it was the first time I had run into him without previously arranging to do so.  And Zekk understood enough to know that I was lost and didn't want to admit it, and that I wanted to be somewhere that was my own and not my family's.

            He was the one who found my second sanctuary.  Looking back on it, I really think that it had been one of his sanctuaries, and that he had either grown out of it or moved on, because he led me straight to it without any detours and seemed to know exactly where it was.

            It was a small abandoned caf shop in the lower levels of the city, almost two kilometers down from my family's quarters at the time.  It was tucked up against the building's shadow, and the doors and windows had all been boarded up and sealed with some type of melted plastic.  How long ago it had been abandoned was anyone's guess, but I remember that the broken pieces of the menu had advertised a cup of caf at half a credit... and I know that Dad had complained only a few days after I got that sanctuary that six credits for a cup of caf was exorbitant. 

            It was dark, filled with dead spinners and living ones and their webs, and if you stayed still for too long, some of the bigger spinners would start creeping around again.  I'm still not afraid of spinners because of that sanctuary.  I had been, when Zekk first helped me crawl through a thin opening at the top of one of the windows.  But he had followed me in, and when I screamed and shrank back against him when a spinner the size of my foot scampered across the floor, he only laughed and picked it up.  I was sure he was going to die– only Jacen, in my mind, could touch anything animalistic and creepy-crawly and live– but he held the spinner still and showed me the six sets of spinneretts, and even let the spinner bite him to show me how harmless it was.  When he didn't die, and when the bite only bruised a bit, he had convinced me both that the sanctuary was safe despite the spinners and that he was my best friend.

            I had that little abandoned room as my sanctuary until I left for the Academy on Yavin 4.  I cleaned it up a bit, got rid of some of the dust and old webs, but mostly I left it the way it was.  I wound up there at least once a week– more, if I was going through the same "I-am-an-adult" mood that had led me to the room in the first place.  It was where I went to cry after being told that I was a cute little girl by some well-meaning dignitary when I was sure I was really a beautiful adult woman; it was where I wondered what it would be like if Zekk actually kissed me, and if we had kids would they have his green eyes or my brown ones?  But it was also the place that I kept all the broken oily engine pieces that Mom wouldn't let me keep in my room, the place where I managed to make my first small shielding module actually fire up and start.  It was the closest place I had to the average teenage girl's haven, and it was filled with spinners and dust and broken glass.  

            I suppose that explains a lot about why I am the way I am.

            I left that sanctuary when I left Coruscant for Yavin 4 and my uncle's Jedi Academy.  I despaired of finding a sanctuary on Yavin 4... there were less people than Coruscant, true, but these people were all Jedi or Jedi apprentices, and rather hard to lie to.  Lying was a skill I learned much later in life; at fourteen, I hadn't quite learned how to believably lie, and so every time I tried to sneak out, I was caught by someone– usually Uncle Luke, sometimes by Kam Solusar or Tionne, three times by Streen, twice by Kyp Durron, and on one memorable occasion, by a Shistavanen Wolfman Jedi whose name I didn't catch, but proved quite capable of scaring me to death, lecturing me on curfew hours, and presenting my back to my uncle.

            After that particularly disastrous attempt, Jacen confronted me about everything and I finally told him that I just wanted a place to go where I wouldn't have to worry about anything.  And in that strange, absolutely clarity of understanding that the two of us sometimes achieved, he knew exactly what I wanted.  A few days later, he showed me an abandoned storage room in the very base of the Temple, underground and safely away from prying eyes.  He mentioned that he had found some sort of escaped creature down there a few days earlier, but thought I might like it anyways.  He even promised that he'd try to keep most of the pesky animals away from the room for me.

            Jacen had been stunned when I had found a spinner in the room and simply laughed and reached for it, rather than screamed and stumbled away.  I kept the lone spinner with me in the room, and sometimes late at night I'd go down into the room to work on whatever mechanical problem I'd have.  I'd always bring the spinner something to eat, and it grew to be nearly the size of my head.  Raynar found the room once, back when he was still someone I considered my rival, and ran off screaming when my spinner dropped down from the doorway right into his face.  I was rather pleased and gave my spinner a treat that night.

            I built part of my lightsaber casing in that sanctuary, me hunched over a crate I used as a desk and my spinner clacking and clicking his first four legs together and madly spinning his web with his last six sets of legs.  I never named my spinner; I simply called him "Spinner", and while he never acknowledged the name, he did learn to acknowledge me.

            My sanctuary survived the destruction of the Temple, but my spinner didn't.  I don't know if he died in the blast, if he evacuated before the Temple blew (a fancy of mine, that he knew something was wrong and that he had escaped), or if he lived through the explosion and simply chose never to return.  Probably died.  And I cried over a spinner, when I wouldn't let myself cry over Zekk or the Academy or any of the friends that I had so nearly lost or the innocence that I had surrendered by fighting for what I thought was right.

.

.

.

What a happy start, no?  Click the little "Review" button and let me know what you think, then continue on to the next chapters!


	2. Chapter 2

Part 2 of 3, **Sanctuary**

By **Ketharil**, who is the same as **SaberBlade **on tf.n, so don't panic, this isn't plagiarized.  And let's see, still don't own Star Wars, still only out to have fun, still exploring the possibilities inherent in this world I love playing with….

.

.

.

.

I kept that third sanctuary until Aunt Mara became my mentor.  For such a brief time, I had a fourth sanctuary: the _Crystal_, a Headhunter... _my_ Headhunter.  My own ship.  She was my fourth sanctuary.  I could climb into her and force myself out of Yavin's greedy gravity and up into the stars, where I could plot an orbit and simply sit and look out over the black space and the silver stars and the glowing golden orb of Yavin.  Or I could grip the controls and send the _Crystal_ dancing and weaving across the night sky, so much like flying the _Rock Dragon_ or the _Falcon_ but so much smaller, so much sleeker, more responsive, tighter turns, faster spins.  

            But so soon after I gained that sanctuary, I lost it.  The First War started when I was only sixteen and ended just after I turned twenty-one.  I think I had something like ten different retreats in those brief and chaotic five years.  A quiet room off the Council's chambers, an empty board room on a transport ship, a field near one of the bases, a hanger bay supply shed, a windswept rooftop, that rock on Hapes that Tenel Ka and Lowie and I shared, even a beach on Mon Cal for a few glorious days.

            But none of these were true sanctuaries.  Havens, certainly, places I could retreat to and let everything and nothing sink in.  But not mine, not truly sanctuaries.

            Jag helped me find my next sanctuary, oddly enough.  My fifth sanctuary was a small Corellian restaurant, a little hole in the wall in a littler city on a small, unknown moon of an insignificant planet.  The fact that I can't remember the names of the city, moon, or planet attests to their unimportance.  But the restaurant was The Diamond, and Jag and I went there once and loved it for the simpleness and peace– things both of us sought after that final chaotic battle.

            It was my sanctuary for maybe a year before it was destroyed.  Jag and I met there occasionally, but more often I would go there by myself, order a table and simply sit and watch the locals laugh and talk and live unencumbered lives.  I went there to cry when Jag died in that first surprise attack, but found that I couldn't mourn him.  He had died the way he had wanted to, in battle fighting for something he had believed in.  He had told me during the First War that if he died, he wanted to die well.  So instead of crying, I ordered Corellian whiskey like he preferred and drank to his memory.  I'm glad I did, because in two more months The Diamond was destroyed in another of the attacks.

            So the Second War started when I was twenty-three, and it's been years since then and there's finally an end in sight.  Not much of an end, since they're going to win, but it will soon be over simply because there will be no more of us left to fight.

            It's going to be hardest for those who survive, I think.  Because as our numbers dwindle down, it grows more and more risky to attack ourselves.  We're forced to turn into fugitives and cowards, fleeing away when we want to fight, knowing that it's better off that we survive to teach the next generation rather than getting everyone who knows how it once was killed off in some futile show of resistance.

            Kyp gave me my next sanctuary, my sixth.  Dad died early on, just a few months after Jag, and Mom didn't last more than a few weeks after him.  She simply fought and fought and fought, and refused to stop until she had no energy left.  Jacen said that she died of a broken heart; I think I agree with him, as melodramatic as it sounds.

            Kyp's always been the one to force me to mourn.  I tend to bottle emotions up; I barely attended Anakin's funeral in the First War because I just couldn't face all my emotions.  Kyp marched me to Anakin's cremation, and he was the one who dragged me to the ceremony where we launched Dad's casket into Corellia's star, when Jacen was the only support Mom had because I was in no shape to help anyone.  But when Mom died, we had to evacuate the base and leave her body behind.  There was no funeral ceremony, no ashes to inter.  Kyp had nothing to badger me into, and there were no closing rites that I sought to avoid.  So instead, I finally sought him out and cried on his shoulder, and he said nothing.  

            But the next day, just before I shipped out with Jacen on the _Falcon_, he tossed me a datapad with a single point highlighted against a star chart.  It took me a few weeks before I found time to go there, and when I did, I discovered a small grassy planet, unpopulated and with no real life-forms inhabiting it.  It was windy, with heavy gravity and long-stalked waving blue grasses spreading from horizon to horizon.

            Jacen and I spent two days there, the first time, and kept returning there between missions.  I had never really shared a sanctuary before, but it was no hardship to share with Jacen.  I had almost lost him more times than I believed possible, and after losing our parents and younger brother, I think both of us were afraid to let each other out of our sight.  We clung tight together as we hadn't done in years: we were the twins again, Jacen-and-Jaina, Jaina-and-Jacen, the same being split into two.  We went on missions together, we watched each other's backs, we saved each other's lives, we ate each other's cooking, we shared the same risks, we slept in the same room, we laughed at the same jokes.  

            He understood me better than I think I understood myself.

            The year I had with Jacen was both the best and the worst year I had gone through during the war.  The start of it was marked with the death of our parents, and midway through it, Aunt Mara died.  Mara had always been invincible to me– even with the First War and her disease, I'd never actually believed that she was mortal.  But like everyone else, she couldn't escape death when it came for her in the form of a poisoned amphistaff.

            Wedge died that year too, and so did Gavin.  It hit Uncle Luke hardest, I think, but the impact on me wasn't little either.  That year saw the death of Rogue Squadron, something that had weathered the Emperor, the Remnant, and the First War.  Watching the Rogues die hurt, that same ache that watching the _Falcon_ grow shabby produced.

            But during that year, I had Jacen.  I was never alone, something that I'd feared all throughout the First War.  And we had Kyp's planet, that tiny ball of soil and grass and wind and rain, and we had each other.  And it was somehow enough to give us hope and strength and courage enough to continue onward.  So we did continue onward, mission after suicidal mission, barely escaping with our lives but giddy with the relief that both of us had survived.

            And then came the disastrous final attack on Coruscant, when our numbers where cut in half on the planet before we could escape.  The half that remained alive to escape lost a third of the survivors on the way out.  And that left us with only a third of us left alive after the entire fiasco.

            Jacen was part of that first half.  I'm still surprised that I wasn't– I think I went into some form of shock when he died.  I _felt_ that briefest second of agony from him before he was gone forever, and after that I don't remember feeling much of anything.  I remember vague snippets of fighting: hundreds of Vong, everywhere I looked; fallen Jedi that I had trained with; fallen soldiers who had died fighting those that had taken their homes; wreckage of landing craft; smoke belching out into the already-polluted air; vegetation– dangerous vegetation– absolutely everywhere; allies and friends absolutely nowhere.  I remember the call of the Dark Side, and how hard that was to resist.

            But I was part of the lucky third who survived Coruscant.  I think I'm doomed to survive.  I was one of the least injured, since I had escaped with only a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder.  One of the medics set me straight, and I remember hearing my shoulder grind back into place with that strange grainy noise of scraping bone.  All I remember thinking is, "That's not a good noise," and then blackness.  I passed out, I'm told.  I call it fainting, but I guess it's all the same, though "passed out" makes it sound a bit less delicate and a bit more noble. 

            I woke up and found myself bandaged and lying on the floor of the medical bay, an anonymous fallen fighter squashed between two more badly wounded soldiers.  No one stopped me from getting up, though my top left half hurt like the Corellian nine hells, and no one cared when I left to find out what was going on– there were too many desperate cases, too many lives hanging by threads, for them to care about a patient who checked herself out a week before she should have.

            I don't think I stopped moving for a day and half after I left the Med Center.  Kyp found me towards the end, when I was starting to see blackness at the edge of my vision, and I remember being surprised that he had Ben with him, of all people.  But one look at Kyp's eyes told me why, and so I said nothing when Ben ran to me and flung his arms around me and began to cry.  He jarred my shoulder and I nearly passed out again, but Kyp had stepped up and reached around Ben to support me.

            I suppose that we made a strange picture, the three of us, hugging each other in the middle of the ship's hanger bay, but everyone else seemed to ignore us and walked by without breaking stride.

.

.

.

.

**Don't forget to hit the nice little "Review" button before moving on to the last chapter!  Let me know which lines you liked, what ideas you hated, what you think in general!**


	3. Chapter 3

Part 3 of 3, **Sanctuary**

By **Ketharil**, who is really **SaberBlade **from tf.n, so don't worry, I didn't copy this.  It's mine, all mine.  Except for the fact that Star Wars doesn't belong to me in the first place.  ::sigh:: details.

.

.

.

.

The three of us went back to the _Falcon_ together that night, where Kyp and I sat with Ben in the main hold, the two of us sitting on either side of him at the dejarik table, and we made him eat something.  Kyp carried him to the crew's room, the one with three beds, one pushed against each wall.  Anakin had slept in the middle one, and Jacen had the one on the left and I had always had the one of the right.  Kyp put Ben down in my old bed, and I got the extra blankets out of the storage bin and made sure he would be warm.  And while he cried himself to sleep, the two of us sat on the edge of the bed together in the darkness, stroking his hair and holding his hand and saying nothing.

            We shut the door and went back to the main hold, and that was when Kyp and I could finally sit down and talk.  

            I didn't have to tell him that Jacen was gone; he knew that already.  Whether he had learned that from the list of casualties or from a fellow survivor or if he just guessed it from my eyes, I'm still not sure.  But whatever it was, I'm grateful he already knew.  It made things easier.

            He told me who hadn't made it.  So many people– friends– missing forever.  And Uncle Luke was gone.  His words sounded hollow when he said that; even thinking about it now, years later, I still find it hard to believe that Uncle Luke– Luke Skywalker, savior of the galaxy– is gone.

            That night I discovered my last sanctuary– the only sanctuary that I've ever found for myself.

            It's funny, really, when I think about it.  My father gave me one sanctuary, Zekk the next, my brother the third, my father again for the fourth, Jag for the fifth, and Kyp for the sixth.  My sanctuaries have all been gifts, of a sort, from the men in my life.  And granted, I have more male friends than female, and I seem to get along better with men than women, but it's kind of a strange coincidence.

            And then I go and find a sanctuary all by myself, and of all the places I pick to go and feel safe, I pick the least likely.

            Since that night, Kyp Durron has been my sanctuary.

            He was definitely the least likely person for me to feel safe around.  We had mended our differences in the First War, and granted, he understood what I had gone through when I had fallen to darkness then, but I never considered him as someone who would make me feel calm and peaceful.  Being around Kyp usually made me jumpy– gave me that adrenaline rush where I knew we would start to banter back and forth.  I used to get more alert around him, wound tighter and tighter for no good reason.  I understand why now, but it was still a bit of a shock for me to discover that when Kyp holds me, I find the peace and acceptance of myself that all my sanctuaries gave me.

            It started when we put a weeping Ben to sleep together, when I finally broke down sitting at the same dejarik table my whole family used to crowd around.  He didn't have to say anything.  All he did was slide around to my side of the table, put his arms around me, and let me cry.

            I'm pretty sure I fell asleep against him that night, because the next I remember I'm waking up in the main quarters of the _Falcon_.  I'd never slept in that bed before, and I know I wouldn't have picked that bed to sleep in even had I been exhausted.  It belonged to my parents.  Not me.  Even when Jacen and I went on missions, even when the _Falcon_ had been completely cleaned out after that mess on Ettniv VI, both of us still slept in our childhood beds in the crew quarters: him on the left, and me on the right.

            I suppose when I woke up, that was when it finally hit me.  I'd been clinging so hard to the past, and it had slipped completely through my fingers.  Kyp, being Kyp, had cut clean through to the center of the problem and solved it in his direct way.  Ben was in the child's bed, and I was in the adult, the way it should have been.  Kyp, of course, was sleeping out in the hold, unwilling to disturb either of us, but then he tends to be rather stupid when it comes to himself.

            The conversation the two of us had that morning was among the strangest I'd ever had.

            "You're the last member of the Jedi Council left, you realize," I'd pointed out.

            He had only shrugged.  "And you're the last Rogue.  We'll learn to live with it."

            "I'm the only family Ben has left.  I'm not letting go of him."

            "No.  You shouldn't," he'd agreed.  "I don't think anyone will try to take him from you.  We're probably not going to be able to mount another attack anytime soon as it is."

            "No, I didn't think so."  I'd paused, and then I remember speaking before I realized what I was saying.  "You're going to stay, aren't you?"

            He had glanced up at me, gaze sharp and dark.  "Do you want me to?"

            "Yeah.  Do you want to stay?"

            "Yeah."

            I don't think he quite knew what he was in for, agreeing to stay.  But there weren't that many of us Jedi left, and in all likelihood we would have wound up close anyways because of that.  But having him near me was reassuring.  He was my sanctuary.  I could go to him and wrap my arms around him and shut my eyes and rest my head on his chest and feel all the horror and fear drain completely out of me.  The first few times I did that, I don't think he knew quite how to respond.  His hands would come up to awkwardly lie on my back, and I don't think he understood.  But soon he would reach for me as often as I would reach for him, and one day we reached for each other at the same time, and I wondered if perhaps I had become _his_ sanctuary, or if sanctuaries could work two ways.  And in a few weeks I'd moved him out from the main hold and into the main quarters with me.  We'd sleep together– just sleep, nothing more intimate– in the same bed, and just knowing that there was someone less than a meter away who would be there for me if I needed him was able to keep me from completely breaking down.

            Three years after the three of us started our odd family on the _Falcon_, Zekk died.  He'd stayed with us once or twice and had usually been sectors away from us, but he was the last link to my childhood, and I remember crying by myself down in the aft gun turret.  Ben found me, and he was alarmed and tried to cheer me up.  And I looked at him and finally realized that he was ten, and when I was ten, Zekk had given me my second sanctuary since I had outgrown the _Falcon_.

            I told Kyp about the sanctuaries that night, and he understood and told me about his own havens.  And the next morning, we landed in a refugee city and Kyp took Ben into the city and I stayed behind and created a sanctuary out of the old smuggling compartments that had saved five lives so long ago on the first Death Star.  And Kyp and Ben came back, bringing a meal that none of us had cooked and we had a small celebration for no reason other than cheering me up.  Ben had even brought me back a small bag of sugared candies.

            And after dinner, I told him that I was upset because Zekk had died, and I explained that when I was ten Zekk had given me a sanctuary on Coruscant.  And I gave him the pitiful sanctuary I'd made out of the smuggling compartment: I'd piled it high with our spare blankets and pillows, and given him the extra datapad and the few droid parts he'd been randomly tinkering with.  Not much, compared with what I'd had, but all I had to give him.  And Ben had understood, and had thanked me with a hug and a kiss on my cheek.

            It's hard to explain what Ben is to me.  More than a cousin and less than a son; not quite a nephew, though that's closer, but not a little brother either.  It's harder to define his relationship with Kyp, who seems to be some combination of brother and friend and uncle.  But Ben's family, the only real blood family that I had left, and knowing that he had understood what I had tried to give him comforted me.

            He'd slept in the compartment that night, and I had gone to my bed silently, sat on the edge, curled up and cried again.  Kyp had reached over and pulled me against him and let me cry, and when I had finished he bent his head and kissed me.  And that was the first night when I lay quietly in the dark, happily in my sanctuary– Kyp's arms securely around me, even in his sleep– and wondered if our children would inherit his eyes or mine.

            It took us half a year after that before we were married.

            When we celebrated Ben's twelfth birthday, there were four of us.  Our daughter wound up with Kyp's eyes and my hair, and I can't say I'm disappointed, since when she turned three her brother was able to open vibrant green eyes and coo delightedly at her.  

            We decided not to name them after the dead.  There were too many dead to honor, too much for our children to live up to, so we gave them new names, names neither of our families had used before.  Ben helped us pick Shesha's name.  We overheard it in a market in Kerish and learned that it meant "pretty", and Ben was quite adamant that his first sibling– for he declared that any child of ours would be his sibling– would be a girl and she would be beautiful, so he picked the name Shesha if the child was a girl.  And she was, and so Shesha she is.  None of us are quite sure where Mitkal's name came from, but Kyp was the one to settle on it, and it fits our son.  Shesha calls him Mit, for short.

            And it's strange, so strange, for me to sit and watch Ben humoring Shesha and Mitkal by letting them race up and down the _Falcon_'s halls.  And occasionally the three will be playing dejarik and they'll call for Kyp and I to come in and sit with them, and it will be the five of us squished in around the table in the main hold, Kyp and I on the ends like bookends on a shelf full of children... just like my parents used to do for me.  And sometimes everything will catch up with me, and I'll have to swallow past the lump in my throat and seek my sanctuary, and Kyp will open his arms and pull me close, and I'll be able to blink away the tears and breathe past the tightness in my chest.

            He does the same with me, sometimes, which is why I think I might be his sanctuary as well.  Once Shesha was playing with his hair, tugging on the strands of it falling over his shoulders, laughing and giggling and tangling her small hands in his hair.  And she said something like Daddy's hair was a different color than Ben's– Ben having decided to grow his own hair out like Kyp's, something that both Kyp and I wondered what Luke and Mara would say about if they could inform us of their feelings on the matter.

            And he had gotten an odd look on his face, and later that night, once we had tucked everyone into the crew quarters and shut the door so that Ben could read his brother and sister a night story, Kyp had turned to me and kissed me and held me and wondered aloud what he had ever done to deserve a little girl who looked up at him with my beautiful eyes and called him "Daddy".

            And I didn't really have a reply for that.

            But I let him hold me, and reveled in knowing that I was in my sanctuary.

            Ben's eighteen now, and every time I look at him, I can see bits of Mara and bits of Luke.  He's learning to fly a Minnishan fighter, and I tell him stories of Rogue Squadron and know he dreams of rebuilding it.  But there's still not enough of us in the resistance to chance that, and so I feel relieved that his dreams are simply dreams, and the battle won't start and take him from me just yet.  Shesha's six, and sometimes reminds me so much of Jacen that it hurts.  She's much the same as him, strong in the Force and uncannily good at communication and melds.  She's her daddy's little girl, much like I was, and if Kyp ever doubts his worth, all he has to do is look at his adoring daughter to know that he's helped create something to be proud of.  Mitkal is almost four, and sometimes Kyp will look at him and get that faraway look on his face that means he's thinking of the past, so I think that he looks like someone from Kyp's side of the family.  He's inquisitive and reckless, and I swear that it's his fault that the hair at my temples is grey.  I can't decide if he takes after my father or his, but I'm already certain that the galaxy will be faced with another heartbreakingly handsome scoundrel in another two decades.

            Ben's bequeathed his smuggling compartment sanctuary to Shesha, because his fighter is his sanctuary now.  It's strange to think of how old my children are getting.

            Three days ago, when we were on Ord Mandell, in the ruins of a hanger, Shesha found a spinner industrially building it's web in a corner.  She came for her daddy to come and kill the monster, but I went with her instead and found a tiny little spinner, barely the length of my finger but fighting so hard to create a web.  And I picked it up, and showed Shesha and Mitkal the four front legs and the six spinneretts, and let it bite my finger– a mere pinch, it was so small– and showed them the harmless bruise that it made.  And now we have a little spinner building harmless webs in our smuggling compartment, trapping the little insects that live on the _Falcon_ and growing larger on the sneaked treats I pretend not to see Shesha and Mitkal taking down to him.

            Kyp tells me I'm sentimental and soft, and I point out that he's the one who lets his children clamber onto his lap and play at steering the ship when we're in hyperspace and there's no need to even be the cockpit.

            And he just laughs and pulls me close and tells me that he loves me, and I smile back and tell him that I love him too, and I don't think about how strange it is that he's my favorite sanctuary of all the ones I've known.

            And even though we hide in remote corners of space and make dozens of hyperspace jumps before landing on an inhabited planet, even though we teach our children the Jedi Code when they've met only six other Jedi in their lives, even though I sometimes wonder how my children can be so happy with such a strange existence... even though all of this gets in the way...

            I have my family, and I have Kyp, and he's my sanctuary.

            And I find that I'm happy.

.

.

.

.

Congratulations, you've reached the end!  Thanks for sticking it out through all the bad times I put our characters through.

**I wrote this as a challenge to myself: I normally hate first-person-narration fics, so I decided to try and make myself write in first-person.  This is the result.  I also usually rely on dialogue to carry the story, and so I wanted to try something with less dialogue… and wound up with almost none!  (strange…)**

**Please, tell me what you think.  I really do appreciate constructive criticism, favorite lines, parts you think didn't flow… anything to help me improve my writing.**

**And yes, I know I have a problem- I seem to enjoy killing characters off a little too much.  My apologies for the vast number of casualties produced in this fic.**


End file.
